Essentially
this program is designed to give IBM customers, ISVs and IBM BPs the
opportunity to gain early experience with the latest release of AIX prior to
general availability. This is a great time to join forces and help IBM mould
the next generation of the AIX OS.

I got
involved in the AIX 6 Open
Beta back in 2007. It was a worthwhile experience. The time I
spent learning new features like WPARs and RBAC, put me in a good position when
it came time to actually implement these outside of my lab environment. It was
also a good opportunity to provide feedback to the IBM AIX development
community. Several AIX developers monitored the comments/questions in the Beta
Forum and provided advice (and sometimes fixes) for known (and unknown!) issues
with the beta release. It also provided the developers with plenty of real
world feedback that they could take back to the labs, long before the product
was officially released. This certainly helped fix bugs and improve certain
enhancements before customers starting using the OS in their computing
environments.

The Getting Started guide provides useful
information that you will need to know before attempting to install the OS. For
example, the beta code will run on any IBM System p, eServer pSeries or POWER system
that is based on PPC970, POWER4, POWER5, POWER6 or POWER7 processors.

The guide
also describes what new functionality has been included in this release of the
beta. If this program is anything like the AIX 6 beta, there may be more than
one release of the code, with further enhancements available in each release.
The new function in this release includes:

AIX 5.2 Workload Partitions
for AIX 7provides the capability to create a WPAR running AIX
5.2 TL10 SP8. This allows a migration path for an AIX 5.2 system running on old hardware
to move to POWER7. All that is required is to create a mksysb image of the AIX
5.2 system and then provide this image when creating the WPAR. The WPAR must be
created on a system running AIX 7 on POWER7 hardware. This is a very
interesting feature, one that I am eager to test.

B.Removal of WPAR local storage device
restrictions.

AIX 7 will allow for exporting a virtual or physical fibre channel
adapter to a WPAR. The WPAR will essentially own the physical adapter and its
child devices. This will allow for SAN storage devices to be directly assigned to
the WPAR's FC adapter(s). This means it will not be necessary to provision the storage
in the Global environment first and then export it to the WPAR. This is also
interesting as we may now be able to assign SAN disk to a WPAR for both rootvg
and data volume groups. Maybe even FC tape devices within a WPAR will work?

D.Etherchannel enhancements in 802.3ad mode.

There are some enhancements to AIX 7 EtherChannel support
for 802.3AD mode. The enhancement makes sure that the link is LACP ready before
sending data packets. If I’m interpreting this correctly, this will ensure that
the aggregated link is configured appropriately. If it’s not, it will provide
an error in the AIX errpt stating that the link is not configured correctly.
This can help avoid situations where the AIX EtherChannel is configured but the
Network Switch is not. At present there is very little an AIX administrator can
do as the link will appear to be functioning even if the Switch end has not
been configured for an aggregated link.

And
the most important point in the Getting
Started guide has to be, how to install the AIX beta code! An ISO image of
the code is provided for download. The installation steps are straightforward
as the image can be installed via a DVD device. Using a media repository on a
VIO server could be one way to accomplish this task. Unfortunately, there is no
mention of NIM install support yet. Here are the basic steps from the guide:

Installing the AIX Open Beta Driver

The
AIX 7 Open Beta driver is delivered by restoring a system backup (mksysb) of
the code downloaded via DVD ISO image from the AIX Open Beta web-site.

Once
you have downloaded and created the AIX 7 Open Beta media (as described above)
follow the following steps to install the ‘mksysb’.

1.Put
the DVD of the AIX Open Beta in the DVD drive. A series of screens/menus will
be displayed. Follow the instruction on the screens and make the following
selections:

•
Type 1 and press Enter to have English during install.

•
Type 1 to continue with the install.

•
Type 1 to Start Install Now with Default Setting.

2.The
system will start installing the AIX 7.0 BETA.

3.Upon
completion of the install, the system will reboot. You can then login as
“root”, no password is required.

Next I
recommend that you take a look at the Release
Notes. It provides a few bits of information that may come in handy when
planning for the install, such as:

·The
Open Beta code is being delivered via an “mksysb” install image. Migration
installation is not supported with the open beta driver.

·The
open beta driver does not support IBM Systems Director Agent.

·When
installing in a disk smaller than 15.36 GB, the following warning is displayed:
A disk of size 15360 was specified in the bosinst.data file, but there is
not a disk of at least that size on the system. You can safely ignore this
warning.

·The
image is known to install without issues on an 8 GB disk.

·oslevel
output shows V7BETA.

By the
way, if you are unable to find a spare system or LPAR on which to install the
beta, perhaps you can consider using the IBM Virtual Loaner Program (VLP).
They are planning to support LPARs running the AIX 7 Open Beta starting from
July 17th. I use the VLP all the time and found it be a fantastic
way to try new things without the need for, or expense of, my own IBM POWER
system. There are some drawbacks, such as not having access to your own
dedicated hardware, HMC, VIO server, NIM master, but still it’s great if you
just want to test something on an AIX system.

I’ll
report back once I’ve got my AIX 7 Open Beta system up and running!